Three by David Lynch

Over the last month I've been watching several of David Lynch's movies and I've felt very differently about all of them even though in many ways they're very similar. They're all very heavy on abstract disturbing imagry. They all also deal with the depression, psychosis, and evil that he feels is present almost everywhere in modern society. I didn't like Ereaserhead very much, I thought Blue Velvet was good, and I feel that Muholland Drive is a masterpiece.

Ereaserhead is Lynch's incredibly abstract first film that he made while in film school in the seventies. The film follows Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance in an almost hypnotizing performance, a very depressed man who lives in a tiny apartment in the middle of a large field of warehouses. Near the begining of the film he finds out that his former girlfriend Mary has given birth to a severely deformed baby that barely even looks human and is constantly screaming. Mary then abrubtly leaves and he is saddled with taking care of the baby himself. The movie then dissolves into a bizzare series of visions including him seeing a dancing woman in his radiator, and his head falling off and being made into pencil erasers.

I didn't like Eraserhead because for most of the time the movie came off as incomprehensible and even kind of stupid. It seems that even David Lynch dosn't know what any of the imagery means. Either his metaphors are painfully obvious (he feels guilt about the baby, and therefore it seems revolitng to him) or don't even try to make sense (the film radomly cuts several times to a disfigured man pulling switches on the inside of a planet). However you have to give David some credit because he made it while only in college, and the things he did well he did very well. The atmosphere is so thick you can literally feel it in the room that your watching it and the black and white cinematography is beautiful and haunting. It's not a great film, but it's definetly worth watching mainly because it achives the rare feat of being like nothing else out there.

Blue Velvet, which was made in the eighties, is all about asking one question. What is the real America? People would traditionally respond with traditional values, friendly people, beautiful neiborhoods. Lynch would argue that there's a layer of filth laying under the perfectly trimmed grass of the American suburbs. The film follows a college student named Jeffrey who is home from college to care for his ailing father. However while out on a walk he discovers a severed ear laying on the ground. He becomes incredibly determind to find out what happened and this leads him into a underground world of violence, torture, and perversity.

I liked Blue Velvet better than Eraserhead. This was mainly because it actually had a comprehensible story to tie it's imagery to, so things actually could be put together. It seems like at many points he's making two different films which bothered me. At points the film feels very conventional and tame as if it were a detective after school special. However at other points its incredibly wierd and very much like Eraserhead. If sure that this was intentional in order to make it seem like there are two very different world in the same place, but this made the film very disjointed. My favorite thing about this film is Dennis Hopper's totally off the wall performance as the psychotic helium inhaling Frank Booth. He is given some of the most ridiculous dialouge in any film ever (he says fuck at least once every sentence) but he manages to make himself always believable. He is at the same time incredibly terrifying and hilarious and I think it's incredible. In the end however David Lynch attempted to make a more conventional film, but he lost a lot of the atmosphere that made him special in the first place.

Muholland Drive, made in 2001, is David Lynch's most recent major work. It follows Betty, played in fantastic performance by Niomi Watts, a wannabe actress who has just moved to LA. At the same time a woman named Rita narrowly escapes being murdered by her chauffeur while in her limo by getting hit by a car. She survives but loses all her memory. The two run into each other and attempt to figure out who Rita really is. Scattered throughout the film are several seemingly unrelated vignettes, such as a director being blacklisted for not casting a girl that the mob wants him to cast and a hitman botching an assassination and killing two people who witness it. Then the movie upends the entire plot and makes you reconsider everything you've seen in it's incredible final half hour that I'm not going to spoil.

Muholland Drive quite simply is a brilliant film. What it does is find the perfect balance between his other two films that I've seen. It's strange and interesting and you'll be searching for clues during the entire movie, but unlike Eraserhead all the wierdness makes sense and comes together at the end. It also has brilliant acting, characters we end up caring about by the time the movie is over, and interesting relationships. I won't say in what context but the way that the movie portrays dreaming, and dreams themselves is incredible. The atmosphere, and the way that events move from one to another is exactly how dreams themselves really feel to me. Even the way that relationships and objects from reality carry over to dreams is dead on. Effectivly this is the movie that I wanted Inception to be. It's one of my favorite films ever and I couldn't recommend it more. This movie shows that Lynch has learned perfectly how to deal with his quirks, and I can't wait for his next film.

Inception Music

Something interesting I found on youtube about Inception.

Cool right? Also if you don't remember, the song that was slowed down is the one used as the kick.

Speed Racer

A certain friend of mine had told me several times several times that she loved the film Speed Racer, and I had ridiculed her for it. But given the fact that I had never actually watched the movie I had no right to judge, so I decided to actually watch the film. And when I did it suprised me. Although not by it's quality, but by how absolutly horrible it was.

Speed Racer is a reboot of the 1960 anime show of the same name, written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. The film follows Speed Racer (yes, that's actually his full name), played by Emile Hirshe, a teenager who loves racing and his family. However racing is shown to be extremely corrupt, and it follows Speed Racer's journey to win the Grand Prix without becoming corrupt himself. Now just by hearing the plot you would think that it's very simple and easy to follow. However I was completly unable to follow a large amount of what was happening. The movie is filled with unnessasary dialouge about the buisness of racing that's loaded with subtext that I was complelty unable to pick up on. I'm saying this as someone who had no trouble following Inception and Memento, and this is a movie made for little kids!

And that brings me to my second point, which is that if you are over the age of ten it's impossible to enjoy this movie. About a good third of the film is spent on horribly unfunny slapstick between Speed's chubby little brother and his monkey. Even in the relativly serious race sequences they find some way to work them in. Unlike charming comic distractions like Dug in Pixar's Up, they're obnoxious and dumb and ruin the chance of any adult enjoying the film. I thought I would never say this, but they're worse than Jar-Jar.

Another problem I have with the film is the use of special effects. The purpose of the film is to be a live-action cartoon, so everything but the actors is CG. Everything is extremely colorful and over the top, and it had the potential to be extremely cool and artsy. However they attempt a degree of realism, and it puts all the scenes in this ackward looking middle ground that causes everything to look cheap and bad.
Speaking of things that are cheap and bad, lets talk about the script. I think it speaks for itself so I'll dicate to you a conversation between two characters after a ninja attack.
Trixe: Oh my god, was that a Ninja?
Pops: More like a non-ja. Terrible what passes for a ninja these days.
Trixe: Cool beans!
It tries so hard to be ironically retro, but because it tries so hard we end up laughing at them rather than with them. Also there isn't a single character in this movie that has an ounce of dimention to them. Speed is the good guy and is always incredibly good, the bad guy is always incredibly evil and has no real motivation.

Finally there's the acting which contains some of the only redeeming qualities of the film. Emile Hirshe is excellent (although he makes some really ridiculous faces during the racing scenes) and so is John Goodman and their scenes together provide some of the only honest material in the entire film. But the acting also provides some negative elements, mainly Matthew Fox as Racer X. I love Matthew Fox on Lost and I think he deserves the Emmy, but he simply cannot play the tough guy and his acting in this movie is laughably bad. On the brightside though they were considering Keanu Reeves for the role who undoubtably would have been worse.

So Speed Racer is bad. Really bad. But I did enjoy watching it, even if it was just so I could laugh at it. So it's not completly without merit. But to actually enjoy it as a legitamate film is impossible for me, and I cannot fathom how someone else could. I'll leave you with a clip from the movie that sums up almost all my problems.

Inception

Over the last few weeks there has been a fair amount of discussion surrounding Inception, and when I say a fair amount I mean critics can't seem to stop arguing about it. This discussion has even invoked meta-critisism of how we view movies in general (AKA A.O. Scott's article today in the New York Times). So I was left wondering, at this late date is there even anything left to say about this movie? So I'm going to give an balanced reivew, and I'm also going to adress some of the major concerns that other critics seem to constantly bring up. And finally spoiler alert, because I'm planning on going into the movie relativly deeply and that requires discussion of the ending.

The most simple way to describe Inception is that it's a film directed by Christopher Nolan about dreams. Of course it's actually much more complicated than that. The film follows Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a man who breaks into peoples dreams and steals their ideas for the benefit of the corporations that he's hired by. However for this film he's hired by the leader of a major corporation (Ken Watabe) to plant an idea in the mind of the son of one of his rivals(Cillian Murphy), this idea being to break up his fathers company. However this process called Inception is very difficult, and it involves drawing the target into dreams within dreams within dreams and tricking them to plant the idea themselves in the third layer. The benefit of doing this job for Cobb is that because he's an international criminal he can't return to his two children in the U.S., and Ken Watabe is able to grant him access to the United States.

That was my attempt at a plot summary, and it's very basic and missing several elements. So as you've seen Inception is complicated and several of my friends and even a few critics (Entertainment Weekley's Owen Gleiberman) have been completly baffled by Inception because they're unable to follow the plot. I'd just like to say contrary to popular opinion that Inception is not a mindfuck, in fact it's not even close to being one. Yes the plot is intricate and occasionally several things are happening at once but it always spells out to you what is happening. For instance there's this idea of how do we ever know is we're in a dream or not. Some people I know spent the entire movie unsure if what was happening was actually happening. But because of the devise of the top it's always very clear. The only part where that's left ambiguous is the ending and that's just to create some room for interpretation. Yes it's complicated, but in terms of structure it's a simple heist movie with a twist. If you want something that's actually confusing watch Christopher Nolan's own Memento or 2001: A Space Odyssey. So if you actually pay attention you shouldn't leave Inception completly baffled.

Speaking of 2001, I'd like to talk about probably my favorite thing in Inception which is the imagery. Nolan uses these dream sequences to toss us from one massive set piece moment to the next and it's really thrilling. First there's a crazy van chase, then straight to Joseph Gordon Levitts rotating hallway fight (one of my favorite movie moments in a long time), then straight to the giant crumbling skyscrapers of Leonardo DiCaprio's limbo world. He never stops throwing new stuff at the audience. I mean it really takes a special director to create four separate dream sequences all happening inside of each other happening real time with the events of all of them effecting the others. Basically the editing and direction is out of this world.

However Nolan still seems to be struggling with his main issue as a filmmaker, which is his unemotional storytelling. While Nolan does do a create job with his imagery and concepts, he shafts possibly one of the movie key things in any movie which is emotion. The one human element in the entire film is Cobb's relationship to his wife ( Marion Coltiard)and despite the superb acting of DiCaprio and Coltiard I had a huge amount of trouble caring about their relationship. Basically there's no emotional payoff in the ending. How am I supposed to care about two faceless children that I never meet? It's also dissapointing that he dosn't spend very much time with his non-Dicaprio characters. He has a terrific cast who play their characters very well (especially Thomas Hardy who steals every scene he's in) and I loved seeing them interact, but the relaitionships went nowhere because the film is overly obsessed with it's own exposition. Therefore Ellen Page's character simply becomes a devise for revealing plot details rather than an interesting an layered character (all of her dialouge basically goes like, "How does this work Leonardo Dicaprio?" "Well it works like...").

Then finally there's the issue of dreams themselves. In Memento Nolan toyed with this idea of memory, which was interesting because we have a very defined idea of how memory works. But no one really knows how dreams work, and when I've talked to people about this it seems everyone dreams differently. For most people I've talked to dreams don't take place in defined spaces like in Inception, they feel much more hazy and surreal. So the fact that he make's them these very straightforward defined spaces feels like a missed opportunity. But also there's this Freudian take on dreams, in which dreams express the way we truely feel about ourselves and our relationships. So the complete lack of that in Inception is dissapointing, but another example of Nolan's key weakness as a director. There's nothing more emotional than our dreams, yet he makes them all about technology and science.

So Inception is an incredibly well made film with several interesting concepts, but it's nowhere near being a perfect film. But it's a huge amount of fun to watch, and it's nice to see a big budget film that actually requires you to leave your brain on. So go see Inception, I really liked it.

Network

On what's supposed to be a news program the anchor is simply chosen because he's mentally unstable and it produces ratings. For standard programing the network films criminals doing dispicable things in real life and broadcasts it on television for the public. When you hear that you might think of modern television with Glen Beck's tearful rants and reality telivision. But this is actually the events of Sydney Lumet's 1976 satire Network. Despite the slight confusion in tone the movie is a brilliant, scathing and eerily prophetic look at the the television industry and it's loss of integrity for the sake of greed.

Network centers around the news division of the struggling television network UBS (effectivly a fourth version of ABC, NBC and CBC) which has just been taken over by the large corporation CCA. Howard Beale is the longtime news anchor for UBS's nightly news and he learns that in two weeks he will lose his job due to low ratings. He responds by announcing during a live broadcast that he will shoot himself on live television in a week and claiming that life is bullshit. But instead of removing him from the news CCA decides to keep him on the show anyways once they notice that his mental instability has dramatically increased ratings. Eventually the news show has a live studio audience, a fortuneteller predicting the news, and Beale giving firey yet intelligent rants on the evils of television.

The first thing you notice while watching this movie is the oscar winning script written by Paddy Chayefsky. While at points brutally funny, it's also brutally tragic. It takes simply the subject of a corporation taking over a television network and uses it to talk about the sterilizing effect it has on our knowledge, relationships, and effectivly our entire lives. We spend so much time watching television that we effectivly live and plan our lives like bad cliched TV dramas. Huge tragedies reduced to 30 seconds on a newsbroadcast. It's drained us of our sense of outrage, rendering us almost like robots. In the words of Howard Beale, we should be mad as hell and not want to take it anymore. But the thing is, is that we continue to take it. Howard implores his viewers (and effectivly us as well) to turn off our television sets and we don't. That's the brilliance of the the movie, because it involves the viewer directly in the tragedy of the story. We trap ourselves in a system that simply destroys our humanity.

The second thing you notice is the performances which took home three of the four acting Oscars the year it was released. The flashiest and probably best performance in the film is Peter Finch as Beale. I have two clips of him below and they speak for themselves. He takes an extremely difficult part with three-quarters of the film's important monolouges and infuses it with so much passion and outrage that it's invigorating just watching him. Then there's Faye Dunaway playing constantly talking head of programing Diana. She takes what could have been an irratating and one note part and makes her sympathetic and full of heart, so despite the fact she represents all the film is against you can't help but root for her. Even the smaller parts are fantastic. Robert Duvall is great as the merciless corporate hachet man Frank Hackett and Beatrice Straight is heartbreaking as Louise Shumacher (the shortest performance ever to win an Oscar). This is a massive ensemble film and there's not a single weak link which is a remarkable achievment in itself.

The one flaw of the movie though is that it seems at points that it dosn't know what it wants to be. While at points its very over the top and silly in it's exagerated satire, and then at other points it aims to be a realistic drama about the loss of integrity and humanity in television and humanity as a whole. The tone shifts back and forth rapidy, sometimes several times in a single scene and it makes the movie seem slightly disjointed. But if you think about it possibly that was intentional because now what was viewed is satire is real life, so mabye the ridiculousness was intended to be mixed right in with the humanity.

The film's great achievement is it's humanity. The film is just bursting with emotion from the greatest depths of sorrow, to hell like anger, to incredible happiness. It even manages to stir some of the same feelings in you as you realize that the state of telivision and entertainment as a whole is very much like Network's. It's so brillant and immersive that it makes you a character yourself. The film breeds a very personal relationship with the viewer and because of that I couldn't recommend it more.